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Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire book cover

1st Edition

Feminine Law Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire

By Jill Gentile, Michael Macrone Copyright 2016
330 Pages
by Routledge

330 Pages
by Routledge

330 Pages
by Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire explores the conjunction between psychoanalysis and democracy, in particular their shared commitments to free speech. In the process, it demonstrates how lawful constraints enable an embodied space or "gap" for the potentially disruptive but also liberating and novel flow of desire and its symbols. This space, intuited by the First... Read more
About the Authors , Preface , Introduction , The space between , The fundamental rule: freedom in psychoanalysis , The paradox of freedom and the first amendment , What is special about speech? , The polis, analysis, and excluded voices , Repression , Free speech? For whom? , Facilitating speech , Hate speech, survival, love , Enshrined ambiguity: drawing lines between speech and action , On having no thoughts: freedom in the context of feminine space , Metaphors of space , Phallic fantasy and vaginal primacy , Laws of lack and feminine law , Naming the vagina: on the feminine dimension of truth , Clinical interlude: the body announces itself , Free speech on the playground of desire , Coda: homeland security and the secure home base

Biography

Jill Gentile

Creatively bringing together the Founding Fathers and the father of psychoanalysis, Jill Gentile begins with the foundational ideas of free speech in democracy and free association on the couch, opening up a fascinating unexplored space that illuminates the magic of language and the paradoxes, limits, and complexities at the heart of desire. This is an erudite, bravura performance that makes good on a long deferred hope that psychoanalysis can bring deeper understanding to our political confusions. --George Makari, MD, author of Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind and Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis

 

Jill Gentile has written a passionate love letter to psychoanalysis and democracy, to free association and free speech. Reaching beyond the phallocentrism of earlier psychoanalytic thought, Gentile reconfigures feminine 'lack' as a generative space of potentiality. Gentile revolutionizes Freudian theory while deftly paying homage to what was revolutionary about it in the first place. The effect of her stunningly erudite and original interpretation is akin to what Alain Badiou calls a 'truth-event': it shatters conventional mythologies regarding femininity and its (lack of) social status, and reveals a whole new universe of (feminine) possibility. --Mari Ruti, PhD, Professor of Critical Theory, University of Toronto, and author of Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics

 

The repudiation of femininity can be nothing else than a biological fact, a part of the great riddle of sex. So stated Freud. Jill Gentile takes this assumption as an invitation to go beyond, in this rich and expansive exploration of the possibility of naming the feminine. Ranging across semiotics, political theory, and the panoply of contemporary psychoanalysis, Gentile renews both clinical theory and democratic philosophy. Playful and incisive, this work opens new spaces for contemplation. --David Lichtenstein, PhD, editor of DIVISION/Review

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